The Kindness of Strangers

People are sometimes quite helpful to the strangers they encounter on the street-and sometimes they are not. Importantly, the likelihood of finding a helpful stranger depends strongly on where you are. A study the author conducted several years ago gauged the relative helpfulness one could expect to experience in 36 U.S. cities. More recently he extended that study to 22 foreign cities and found that people in some countries (and cultures) are indeed more helpful than others. In general, those living in richer countries appear to treat one another less kindly than their counterparts in poorer nations.